If I had only seen the
title I might not have opened it. I do bristle at the suggestion that everyone is the greatest. How does that even play out? But my daughter in law believed I would enjoy the book, and sent a copy.
I read it in one gulp.
It turns out that the author had his own misgivings about the notion that he was the greatest, which was his father's message every chance he got. Yet it was part of his DNA and when Johnny became a father the words spilled out of his mouth too. The glitch was, his son Sammy had epilepsy. Lots of it. And it can seem artificial to tell a seizing baby that he is the greatest.
Through a grueling few years of whack a mole with anti seizure drugs, then anti nausea cocktails, and eventually an unrelenting diet regime Sammy began to come out of the fog. But another cloud was there to surround him. He has autism.
Which is why my daughter in law suggested that I read it.
Still as pithy, and funny, and poignant as the memoir is the autism is not the reason I am singing its praises, which technically I have only barely started to do. It is the marriage. Johnny and his wife Lori evolve into a partnership of strength and compassion, tapping resources such as their trust in God. He is transparent about his own failings. His feet of clay. But his wife...
In the exhaustion and uncertainty of finding answers for her son, along with two other little boys who are the greatest too, Lori learns a new way to love. Or so her husband describes it. She realizes that Sammy needs his rock collection. The hundreds that he carries, and lines up on the windowsill. For a child whose world and body literally shook with spasms many times a day for years, he needs the certainty of stones.
Sammy is a boy of few words. But sometimes they arrive with a force that engraves them on his father's heart.
"You pray. Pray, Dad. Pray to God. No more seizures."
The family went on a vacation at the Grand Canyon, though for parents whose son has serious health concerns the word hardly applies. Lori and the other boys are up ahead with cousins following a trail called The Narrows. The path was born of the relentless rush of the Virgin River through sandstone, and Johnny kept his expectations low for how far Sam would make it. Just as the water level rises Sam speaks.
"I'll follow you and you follow me."
Sam doesn't give up. Even when he falls, and the sun beats down. Farther than his father could have dared to aspire, Sammy steps into the journey. His journey. As they round a bend the others are headed back and his mother stares in disbelief over how far they have come.
Sammy knows. He pokes his chest over and over.
"I did it. I did. I did."
